• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.1047-1057
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• 2018

As the number of services offered on the Internet exponentially increases, password managers are increasing popular applications that store several passwords in an encrypted database (or password vault). Browser-integrated password managers or locally-installed password managers store the password vault on the user's device. Although a web-based password manager stores the password vault on the cloud server, a user can store the master password used to sign in the cloud server on her device. An attacker that steals a user's encrypted vault stored in the victim's device can make an offline attack and, if successful, all the passwords in the vault will be exposed to the attacker. This paper investigates the vulnerability of the password vault stored in the device and develops attack programs to verify the vulnerability of the password vault.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.17-27
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• 2020

Many users are using password managers in order to conveniently manage several usernames and passwords needed to access the web sites. The password manager encrypts and stores several passwords on the server, and the user accesses the server to receive the password information. Thus, if an attacker can sniff a message between the password manager and the server and decrypt the message content, or if an attacker can steal the computer's memory and decrypt the message content, then all the passwords will be exposed to the attacker. In this paper, we analyze the client-server communications and encryption process of password mangers and show there is a serious vulnerability in memory attack.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.4 no.6
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• pp.1294-1310
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• 2010

User authentication using fingerprint information provides convenience as well as strong security. However, serious problems may occur if fingerprint information stored for user authentication is used illegally by a different person since it cannot be changed freely as a password due to a limited number of fingers. Recently, research in fuzzy fingerprint vault system has been carried out actively to safely protect fingerprint information in a fingerprint authentication system. In addition, research to solve the fingerprint alignment problem by applying a geometric hashing technique has also been carried out. In this paper, we propose the hardware architecture for a geometric hashing based fuzzy fingerprint vault system that consists of the software module and hardware module. The hardware module performs the matching for the transformed minutiae in the enrollment hash table and verification hash table. On the other hand, the software module is responsible for hardware feature extraction. We also propose the hardware architecture which parallel processing technique is applied for high speed processing. Based on the experimental results, we confirmed that execution time for the proposed hardware architecture was 0.24 second when number of real minutiae was 36 and number of chaff minutiae was 200, whereas that of the software solution was 1.13 second. For the same condition, execution time of the hardware architecture which parallel processing technique was applied was 0.01 second. Note that the proposed hardware architecture can achieve a speed-up of close to 100 times compared to a software based solution.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.11-21
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• 2008

Biometrics-based user authentication has several advantages over traditional password-based systems for standalone authentication applications. This is also true for new authentication architectures known as crypto-biometric systems, where cryptography and biometrics are merged to achieve high security and user convenience at the same time. Recently, a cryptographic construct, called fuzzy vault, has been proposed for crypto-biometric systems. This construct aims to secure critical data(e.g., secret key) with the fingerprint data in a way that only the authorized user can access the secret by providing the valid fingerprint, and some implementations results for fingerprint have been reported. However, the previous results had some limitation of the provided security due to the limited numbers of chaff data fer hiding real fingerprint data. In this paper, we propose an approach to provide both the automatic alignment of fingerprint data and higher security by using a 3D geometric hash table. Based on the experimental results, we confirm that the proposed approach of using the 3D geometric hash table with the idea of the fuzzy vault can perform the fingerprint verification securely even with more chaff data included.